Jacob Smith
Resume
Professional Summary
Distributed Systems Engineer with extensive experience optimizing performance-critical applications and implementing infrastructure as code and CI/CD pipelines. Specialized in enhancing system observability and creating intuitive abstractions that allow developers to work effectively with complex systems.
Languages and technologies
- Languages: Ruby, Go, C, Bash, Lua, SQL, JavaScript (Node.js)
- Systems Engineering: Kernel debugging (e.g., strace, tc), kernel tuning (I/O scheduling, virtual memory), memory profiling
- Performance & Optimization: Build system optimization, SQL query tuning, low-latency systems design
- Distributed Systems & Databases: PostgreSQL, Kafka, Cassandra, Redis, Elasticsearch
- Cloud Runtimes: AWS (ECS, EKS, EC2, EBS, RDS, etc.), Kubernetes, Terraform, Docker, Linux KVM
- Cloud Governance: IAM policy management, encryption, secrets management, network security, audit logging, data retention
Work Experience
DevOps Consultant
Freelance (Remote)
October 2023 - Present
- Refactored an untested and brittle C/Ruby integration based on SWIG, enabling Ruby developers to make API changes without C knowledge while maintaining runtime safety and performance
- Developed a Fiddle-based wrapper for interactive library exploration and incremental API design, improving development velocity for a Ruby service with C dependencies
- Resolved a catastrophic outage by identifying and resolving virtual machine I/O bottlenecks, optimizing workload distribution across virtual block devices to account for network latency overhead
- Authored detailed runbooks and automated workflows to ensure long-term system resiliency
Staff Engineer
Kajabi (Remote)
July 2021 - July 2023
- Provided technical leadership for 30+ staff across Production Engineering, UX Engineering, Quality Engineering, and Security & Risk
- Guided 9 cross-functional teams in data systems design and implementation, with a focus on maintainable abstractions and performance
- Mentored engineers in optimizing application performance and designing resilient interfaces to distributed systems like Kafka and DynamoDB
- Designed content-addressable storage for rendering end user templates, significantly reducing memory usage across processes
Staff Production Engineer
Kajabi (Remote)
December 2020 - July 2021
- Rebuilt the CI/CD pipeline for a large Rails application using Docker and BuildKit, reducing median build time from 45 to 9 minutes through careful optimization of layer caching, dependency caching, conditional step execution, and parallel execution and as a side effect, allowed builds to be run locally with fully reproducible build artifacts.
- Optimized Aurora PostgreSQL to handle 50,000 QPS during peak loads through configuration tuning and query optimization
- Implemented database performance isolation by decoupling workloads with a foreign data wrapper (FDW), preserving functionality while preventing system-wide slowdowns
Senior Production Engineer (Tech Lead)
Kajabi (Remote)
November 2019 - December 2020
- Defined the hiring and onboarding processes for the Production Engineering team and grew the team from 2 to 7 engineers while managing 2 full time contractors.
- Designed and executed a near-zero downtime migration of a Heroku PostgreSQL database to AWS Aurora PostgreSQL, leveraging kernel tuning and cache warming to reduce customer impact and proactive testing and rollback planning to ensure resilience.
- Developed infrastructure-as-code, migration automations, and provided technical leadership to the Production Engineering team and the 6 product development teams for migrating application compute workloads from Heroku to AWS EKS.
- Upgraded critical dependencies in a Rails monolith, improving system stability and performance
- Implemented libraries and services in Ruby, primarily around resilience in the face of partial system failure
- Enhanced system observability through strategic instrumentation and alerting systems, enabling rapid diagnosis of performance bottlenecks and security incidents
Senior Software Consultant
Subcontractor for Test Double (Remote)
May 2019 - November 2019
- Worked on the Ruby VM (i.e. “MRI”) in C to prototype the reliability and performance impact of interning all string literals.
- Worked on a MySQL client library written in C, helping prepare it to be open sourced
- Diagnosed and fixed memory problems in a Go service that used
cgoto integrate with a Rust library that itself integrated with a C++ library, reducing memory usage of ~10k server instances by ~250MB each, significantly decreasing resource utilization across a Kubernetes cluster
Lead Software Engineer
ACS Technologies (Greenville, SC)
January 2019 - May 2019
- Led a team of 3 engineers extracting a service from a monolithic .NET web application on MSSQL to a Go microservice on Couchbase.
- Mentored engineers across multiple teams on Go concurrency patterns, testing methodologies, and cross-language integration
Senior Software Consultant
Test Double (Remote)
2016 - 2018
- Implemented and optimized a serialization/deserialization format for real-time IoT event data based on protobufs with a custom wire format “wrapper” to support routing and aggregating messages based on a polymorphic message type.
- Designed and implemented event processing services using Kafka, Cassandra, Redis, Ruby, and Java
- Built and optimized CI/CD pipelines on Heroku, Kubernetes, and EC2 using Harness, CircleCI, and other platforms and tools
Front End Engineering Instructor
The Iron Yard (Greenville SC)
2014 - 2016
- Taught 12-week courses in front end development, focused on JavaScript apps using simple Node.js backends.
Web Developer
Freelance
2010 - 2014
- Developed web applications for small businesses and startups using Java, PHP, Node.js, nginx, and MySQL.
- Worked with EC2 during its early years and learned how best practices for Linux administration on AWS required a different approach than on physical hardware.